Teaching Encaustic for Recovery

What happens when you combine hot wax and a group of young adults in recovery? A little magic.

I was surprised at how open the class was to the encaustic medium. When I was first introduced to encaustic I was a bit intimidated. The medium was practically backwards to the way I normally created my art and it took me a little while to really get going on my first piece because I was stuck in my head. These students, most of them non-artists, just grabbed a masonite canvas and hit the ground running. Maybe they had the advantage of seeing this as an ephemeral task.

I taught this class a bit differently than my normal workshop. I knew these students wouldn’t be into the history of encaustics and I wanted to make sure I presented the medium in a way that didn’t seem complicated and didn’t lose their interest. I kept the project simple, each student chose a photo (some photo copied from Juxtapoz magazine) and then painted on or around the photo as they wished. These are the results:

I think the student who painted this piece thought what he was doing was a joke or over-the-top but I find the raw emotion of this piece intriguing.

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